Kennedy Choosing Cultural ‘Enlightenment’ Over Conscience

“I don’t see much future for the Americans…it’s a decayed country. And they have their racial problem, and the problem of social inequalities. How can one expect a State like that to hold together?” – Adolf Hitler, Jan. 7, 1942

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No matter what else you may think about US
Senator John Neely Kennedy, he is far from stupid. He earned law
degrees from UVA and Oxford, after having graduated magna cum laude
from Vanderbilt with degrees in Political Science, Philosophy, and
Economics.

In
his less than two years in Washington, he’s become the darling of
the soundbyte-seeking U.S. Capitol press corps – always ready with
a cornpone comment: “Our country was founded by geniuses, but it’s
being run by idiots”; “We’ve got some hogs who have all four
feet and their snouts in the trough”; “President Trump is a hard
dog to keep on the porch.”

Adolf
Hitler described this modus operandi in Mein
Kampf:
“All
propaganda must be presented in a popular form and must fix its
intellectual level so as not
to be above the heads of the least intellectual
of those to whom it is directed.”

It’s
the classic “common man” or “plain folks” propaganda
technique – relatively harmless in and of itself — and Kennedy is
very, very good at it.

But
now Kennedy – who has said he’ll announce his decision on whether
to enter the 2019 Louisiana governor’s race by December 1 – is
stepping up his propaganda game, trying another method. While it’s
a tactic that has, in the past, been highly effective, the results of
its use have also – historically – been universally condemned.

It’s
an appeal to fear, with some flag-waving, appeal to prejudice, and
exaggeration thrown in. It’s also known as “Reductio
ad Hitlerum.”

Here’s
what Kennedy wrote in a letter to the editor of The
Advocate,
published this week.

“A
recent column by Lanny Keller lamented a drop in the number of
international students studying in the U.S. under the Trump
administration. I’d like to offer another perspective on this
issue.

Earlier
this year, FBI director Christopher Wray warned against naivete when
it comes to Chinese students on American college campuses. More
specifically, Wray said: ‘(China is) exploiting the very open
research and development environment that we have, which we all
revere, but they’re taking advantage of it.’

No
other country sends more students to the U.S. than China.
Approximately 350,000 Chinese students further their education in the
U.S. every year. We know that some of them spy and steal. They’re
not stealing the answers to a history quiz or sneaking into Coach O’s
office to look at his playbook. They’re stealing our technology,
whether it’s agricultural advancements or automobile innovations.

They
want our research, our ideas and the results of all those hours spent
working in university laboratories. More simply put, they want our
intellectual property.

Three
of my colleagues and I raised this issue when we met with Li Keqiang,
premier of the State Council of the People’s Republican of China, a
few weeks ago. We had a frank discussion in which we made it clear
that China needs to stop cheating if it wants to be a true trade
partner.

I’m
not suggesting that every Chinese student is stealing from us. Those
who play by the rules are welcome; Americans should be happy to have
them. I also believe, however, that the number of Chinese students
who don’t play by the rules, and who are encouraged to steal our
intellectual property by the Communist Party of China, would surprise
you.

China
is pursuing a “Made in China 2025” policy to gain an edge against
the rest of the world in a number of high-tech industries. Stealing
U.S. intellectual property would greatly help China achieve this
initiative.

The
problem is that China isn’t just in a race to catch up with the
U.S. and other global leaders. They want to surpass us, and they’re
not adverse to cheating.

Earlier
this year, a Chinese citizen who came to the United States on a
student visa was arrested in Chicago for spying on defense
contractors. October brought the arrest of a Chinese intelligence
officer who worked for years to wrestle trade secrets away from
aerospace experts in the U.S.

America
is a country known for innovation and entrepreneurship. College
campuses stimulate our creativity and ambition. University research
gave us rocket fuel, GPS, oil refining, seat belts and pacemakers.

Despite
the brainpower on college campuses, naivete remains a concern. If
we’re not careful, we’ll export our ‘Made in America’ brand
to China.”

You
read that right. Our illustrious junior senator is trotting out the
old trope of the “Yellow Peril”, a.k.a., the “Yellow Menace”
– defined as “a racist-color metaphor that is integral to the
xenophobic theory of colonialism: that the peoples of East Asia are a
danger to the Western world.”

Make
no doubt about it, it IS racism, and it’s not the first time this
particular demonization has been used here in the United States
against Chinese people legally allowed to be here. As Diana Preston
(a historian and BBC broadcaster, who was also trained at Oxford)
defines it so succinctly in her book, The
Boxer Rebellion,
“The
racialist politician calls for white unity against the non-white
Other who threatens from Asia.”

When
the Burlingame Treaty of 1868 normalized US-China trade relations,
and authorized Chinese immigration to the United States, it prompted
an influx of Chinese workers, many of which came to work toward
completion of the Transcontinental Railroad. They were the ones
tasked with placing the bottles of nitroglycerin used to clear the
rocky mountainous paths for the rails.

Political cartoon from the 1870s

Yet
many working class white people of the day saw these people of
different skin-tone, appearance, culture, and language as having
“stolen” their job opportunities. The clamor against “the
filthy, yellow hordes” became so fierce that there were mass
lynchings in Los Angeles, riots and arson that destroyed Chinese
enclaves in Denver, Seattle, Wyoming, and Oregon.

Even
Horace Greeley (of “Go West, young man!” fame), founder and
publisher of the New York Tribune, penned an editorial calling for
cessation of Chinese immigration, saying “The
Chinese are uncivilized, unclean, and filthy beyond all conception,
without any of the higher domestic or social relations; lustful and
sensual in their dispositions; every female is a prostitute of the
basest order.”

All
of this savage Sinophobia led to passage of the Page Act of 1875, the
first restrictive immigration law in US history. It prohibited the
immigration of Chinese women and was followed in 1882 by the Chinese
Exclusion Act, prohibiting immigration of all Chinese laborers. That
law remained in effect until 1943.

Book by M.P. Shiel, originally published 1899. Still being reprinted: most recently, as paperback in Aug. 2017

At
that point, the United States was battling another “Yellow Peril”:
Japan. And this country was rounding up American citizens of Japanese
descent (along with those of Korean and Taiwanese descent),
confiscating their property, and sending them to internment camps
(including Camp Livingston in central Louisiana).

The
Los Angeles Times, in an op-ed published April 22, 1943, stated, “As
a race, the Japanese have made for themselves a record for
conscienceless treachery unsurpassed in history. Whatever small
theoretical advantages there might be in releasing those under
restraint in this country would be enormously outweighed by the risks
involved.”

Sound
familiar?

Yet
under Republican President Ronald Reagan, through the Civil Liberties
Act of 1988, this nation formally apologized to Japanese Americans,
and made restitution for the internments, as being “unjust
and motivated by racism and xenophobic ideas rather than factual
military necessity.”

Under
Republican President George H.W. Bush, another apology was issued
through the Civil Liberties Act of 1992. Bush
sajd,
“No
nation can fully understand itself or find its place in the world if
it does not look with clear eyes at all the glories and disgraces of
its past. We in the United States acknowledge such an injustice in
our history. The internment of Americans of Japanese ancestry was a
great injustice, and it will never be repeated.”

So
why is Republican U.S. Senator John Kennedy dredging up the dirty
device of the “Yellow Menace” now?

His
party’s President, Donald Trump, has been engaged in a trade war
with China for most of this year. Trump imposes tariffs on Chinese
goods; China retaliates and imposes tariffs on U.S. products,
including soybeans, chemicals, oil, and liquified natural gas. The
products targeted account for 80.8% of Louisiana’s $7.9-billion in
exports to that country.

At
least 15% of Louisiana’s $5.6-billion soybean crop was plowed under
this
year,
with most of the rest sitting in storage, accumulating fees for the
farmers who grew the beans,
but cannot now sell them.

LNG
shipments from Louisiana to China are down 90.6% from a year ago,
according to an Oct. 30, 2018 article in Forbes.

“My
state is in trouble,” Kennedy told FoxNews last evening, when asked
about his possible run for governor.

But
don’t blame Trump or his tariffs for those economic woes – blame
China? Cultivate distrust by accusing Chinese students attending our
colleges and universities of “cheating, stealing and spying.”
They are the “Yellow Menace.”

Nevermind
that Trump’s far-right senior policy advisor, Stephen Miller, is
behind this. The Financial
Times
reported in early October that Miller, the architect of Trump’s
travel ban against Muslims – as well as author of the policy of
separating undocumented immigrant children from their parents – has
been championing the idea of ending all Chinese student visas.

On
March 13, 1933, the Third Reich established the “Ministry of
Propaganda and Public Enlightenment” (which also controlled the
press, radio, theatre and film) with goals of establishing enemies in
the public mind: Jews, Romani (gypsies), homosexuals, Bolsheviks
(communists), along with cultural trends including “deviant art”.
Joseph Goebbels was appointed as the agency’s Minister.

John
Kennedy, having majored in philosophy, is undoubtedly familiar with
the George Santayana quote from Reason
in Common Sense:
“Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

Yet
he steadfastly toes the party line.

When
asked about the recent gassing of women and children at the
US-Mexican border, he says, “I understand that our Border Patrol
agents were attacked. And when our agents are attacked, they should
be allowed to respond.”

He
rallies racism by writing about the hordes of Chinese students
stealing and spying on our college campuses.

It
is all eerily and frighteningly repetitious.

John
Kennedy, flattery-operated by all
the
attention
he receives from
the Washington media, has
become complicit in disseminating the administration’s propaganda.
Rather than applying his well-trained intellect to dispassionate
reflection on the similarities between the current course and the
historical path it replicates, he is
reflecting
now on his ambition to become governor. Maybe he doesn’t realize
that, along the way, he seems to have swallowed his conscience.

Sue Lincoln is a veteran and widely-respected reporter who has been covering Louisiana politics for nearly three decades. Originally from Long Beach, California, Sue’s career in journalism began on the radio in Los Angeles. After moving to Louisiana, Sue enrolled at LSU and earned a degree in English. For ten years, from 2000-2010, she was the Assistant News Director at Louisiana Network. Sue also worked as the education reporter for Louisiana Public Broadcasting and has contributed to various state publications as a freelance journalist. But she is perhaps best known for her work with WRFK, Baton Rouge’s NPR affiliate, where, for the past four years, she hosted the popular daily segment Capitol Access.